[Fishlink] ~~>FISHLINK SUBLEGALS 5/24/02<~~

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                     ~~>FISHLINK SUBLEGALS 5/24/02<~~
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       A WEEKLY QUOTA OF FISHERY SHORTS CAUGHT AND
     LANDED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR FISHERIES RESOURCES 
     AND THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION OF FISHERMEN'S
                                     ASSOCIATIONS

  VOL. 05, NO. 21                                                 24 MAY 2002
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This week's issue of Sublegals is available in PDF format on the web at 
www.sublegals.net. We have also pasted the text below for those who 
still wish to read it through your email. In the coming weeks we will be 
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look, we are continuing our Sublegals Fundraiser to support the Institute 
for Fisheries Resources and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's 
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of community fisheries education. 
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"People often tell me I should run the government like a business.  So I
always ask, which one: Enron, Arthur Anderson, Capital
Consultants....?"   ......... Mike Burton, Portland, Oregon Metro 
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IN THIS ISSUE.......

Columbia River Dredging Plan Gets OK From NMFS. 5:21/01.

NMFS Plan for Lower Klamath Flows May Be 
Too Little, Too Late. 5:21/03.

UN Report on World Environmental Crisis Paints 
Bleak Picture. 5:21/04.

Global Warming May Force Sharp Salmon Declines.  5:21/05.  

U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy - Seattle, WA Meeting. 5:21/10.

AND MORE......
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     5:21/01. COLUMBIA RIVER DREDGING PLAN GETS OK FROM
NMFS:  On 20 May, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
issued its "no jeopardy" Biological Opinion (BiOp) that the deepening of
the Columbia River lower estuary channel by an additional three feet,
from the City of Portland to Astoria (103 river miles), will not
jeopardize the many threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead
species of the Columbia River.  Though the project must still survive
other environmental reviews by the states, this NMFS signoff gives a
key environmental approval to the $188 million project to deepen the
lower Columbia, a measure being strongly pushed by the Port of
Portland and the Northwest Congressional delegation intended to allow
more shipping to Portland of deeper draft international cargo container
ships. The BiOp lets the U.S. Army Corps out of a "jeopardy" opinion
(i.e., likely to cause extinction) for Columbia River salmon stocks so
depressed they have been listed as either threatened or endangered under
the U.S. federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).  

     The Biological Opinion did note that there are likely to be some
changes of channel flow, additional intrusion of salt water up into the
estuary, and some shoreline and shallow habitat erosion, but called these
impacts limited.  The BiOp will require habitat restoration of only 3,420
acres of wetlands to help offset these impacts, far less wetlands and
estuary habitat mitigation restoration than the prior BiOp issued in 1999
that was withdrawn in the face of lawsuits (see Sublegals 5:02/17;
4:26/03; 4:13/05; 4:09/15; 4:04/12; 2:08/05; 2:06/10). The Columbia
River Tribes question the NMFS assumptions on which the draft opinion
is based, and Columbia River salmon fishermen believe that additional
habitat losses to the lower river estuary, which has already lost 90
percent of its biological integrity, could further devastate salmon runs.
The NMFS has said, in other Biological Opinions for the restoration of
Columbia River salmon, that these same estuary areas are vitally
important to ESA-listed Columbia River salmon survival and recovery. 
Columbia River crab fishermen are also concerned that the dumping of
23 millions cubic yards of dredge spoils in the lower estuary would
devastate economically irreplaceable Dungeness crab nurseries in the
lower Columbia, crashing the most productive crab fishery in the
Northwest.    For a copy of the BiOp and related information see:
http://www.nwr.noaa.gov.

     The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been harshly criticized for
flawed and grossly inflated economic benefits estimates for the channel
deepening project, including in a series of investigative reports published
in the Oregonian in March which indicated that the channel deepening
project is unlikely even to pay for itself (see Sublegals 5:10/13 and also:
http://www.oregonlive.com/special/port). Under Corps rules, projects
that are not cost effective have to be cancelled.  Partially as a result of
this media exposure, the Corps is re-evaluating the costs and benefits of
this project, with results expected no sooner than late July. 

     5:21/02.  COLUMBIA RIVER TERN RELOCATION PLAN A
SUCCESS:  Prior dredging operations in the Columbia had resulted in
the creation of an artificial island, named Rice Island, which had become
occupied in recent years by a large colony of terns which became major
unwanted predators of ESA-listed salmon and steelhead in the Columbia
passing by the islands as they migrated out to sea.  Six years ago the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers started a program to relocate the tern colony
on Rice Island to East Sand Island, a natural island which is much farther
out to sea where anchovies, and not salmon and steelhead smolts, could
make up most of the birds' diet.  The plan involved primarily biological
changes, such as planting more grass to make Rice Island less hospitable
to nesting terns, while clearing nesting areas on East Sand Island to
make that habitat more hospitable.  In spite of controversy and lawsuits,
the plan seems to have worked, with nearly all the tern colony now
relocated to East Sand Island.  The total cost of the project since 1999
has been about $100,000, mostly for removing vegetation from East
Sand Island.  "In terms of saving salmon, this is by far the most
cost-effective program out there," comment Bob Willis, chief of
environmental resources for the Portland District Office of the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers. Critics point out that the Corps should not
have allowed the creation of Rice Island to begin with, and that such
mounding problems can create more islands in dump sites from other
planned dredging.  For more of this story, see the 16 May Oregonian at: 
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_stand
ard.xsl?/base/front_page/1021552487161942.xml.

     5:21/03.  NMFS PLAN FOR LOWER KLAMATH RIVER FLOWS
MAY BE TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE:  Analysis of the 16 May Draft
Biological Opinion (BiOp) issued by the National Marine Fisheries
Service (NMFS) on the Klamath River in-river flows for coho salmon
(Sublegals 5:20/09) shows that the "target flows" that NMFS believes
are the minimum necessary to prevent salmon extinction in the lower
river will not be fully realized until at least the year 2010, with even
those to be phased in over time through a process that relieves the
Bureau of Reclamation of any responsibility for providing more than 57
percent of those target flows, even though the Bureau controls the vast
majority of water from the Upper Klamath Basin.  Additionally,
provisions for obtaining the remaining 43 percent of the required in-river
flows from other unspecified sources are so speculative that they may
not meet legal requirements for restoration.  Courts have repeatedly
ruled that speculative future actions, particularly voluntary future
actions, cannot be used as mitigation for species loss that is occurring
today.  "The NMFS plan appears to be more a political move to appease
upper basin federal project irrigators and the Bureau of Reclamation than
a plan to actually restore salmon," commented PCFFA's Glen Spain. 
"The bottom line is that there has to be more water in the river and soon,
or these hard-hit lower river and coastal fishing-dependant communities
will perish.  The draft NMFS water plan looks mostly like paper water
coming too little too late."  Comments by PCFFA on the NMFS lower
river draft water plan are posted on the PCFFA web site at:
www.pcffa.org.

     5:21/04.  UN REPORT ON WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
PAINTS BLEAK PICTURE, NEXT 30 YEARS CRITICAL:  The
United Nation's Environment Programme (UNEP) has published a new
report outlining current trends and the likely results of massive
worldwide over-development and poorly planned development, overuse
of fresh water resources, and worldwide pollution on human populations
over the next 30 years, concluding that the world's fragile ecosystems are
nearing their point of total collapse. The survey concludes that unless
steps are taken soon, much of the world's population will run out of
freshwater or be battered with increasing frequency by disasters such as
cyclones, floods and droughts that will severely affect world food
supplies.  The report, "Global Environment Outline #3" is the third such
report by UNEP, and by far the most comprehensive.  In spite of some
successes in environmental cleanups in North American and Europe, and
the successful international effort to reduce the production and
consumption of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), declining
world environmental quality and global warming threatens to overwhelm
those local successes.  

     Among the findings of the report are that almost 15 percent of the
earth's farmland has now been severely degraded through overgrazing,
overlogging or overfarming, or though chemical contamination.  About
half of the world's rivers are now seriously depleted or polluted, and
about 60 percent of the world's largest 227 rivers have been fragmented
by dams and other engineered works, destroying wetlands and other
ecosystems that people also depend on and displacing between 40 and 80
million people.  Some 80 countries, amounting to 40 percent of the
world's population, were suffering serious water shortages by the
mid-1990's.  About 1.1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking
water and 2.4 billion to good sanitation, particularly in Asia and Africa. 
The global impact of marine contamination, an increasing problem in
coastal areas, may be running at nearly $13 billion/year and is expected
to rapidly increase.  Threats to the oceans including climate change, oil
spills, discharges of heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants (POPs)
and loss of coral reefs are accelerating.  Just under a third of the world's
fish stocks are now ranked as depleted, overexploited or recovering. 
Depletion of the world's ozone layer has also now reached record levels,
further affecting ocean ecosystems in the Southern hemisphere.  All
these trends are expected to get much worse over the next 30 years if left
unchecked. For more information and a copy of the full report see:
http://www.unep.org.

     5:21/05.  GLOBAL WARMING MAY FORCE SHARP SALMON
DECLINES: A recent report, based on the best current estimates of the
impacts of global warming, indicates that salmon and steelhead runs, as
well as many other fish, may disappear from a large portion of their
current range due to average water temperature rises likely over the next
decades.  Habitats for some cold-water species may shrink by as much as
17 percent by 2030, 34 percent by 2060 and 42 percent by 2090 if
heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide is not reduced worldwide,
according to a study released 19 May by Defenders of Wildlife and the
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  The analysis covers four
species of trout -- brook, cutthroat, rainbow and brown -- as well as four
species of salmon -- pink, coho, chinook and chum.  Researchers looked
at air and water temperature data from more than 2000 sites across the
U.S., applying three different internationally recognized climate models
to estimate probable changes in suitable cold-water habitat over time,
based on United Nation's climate change predictions.  All these species
are cold-water fish, and many are already living at the edges of their
temperature tolerance limits, with many salmon runs on the west coast
already pushed to near extinction from other unrelated factors.  The
report, "Effects of Global Warming on Trout and Salmon in U.S.
Streams," can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/ntrout.asp.

     5:21/06.  NW POWER PLANNING COUNCIL LOOKS AT HIGH
HATCHERY PRODUCTION COSTS:  As part of its long overdue
hatchery policy review process, economists with the Northwest Power
Planning Council, the federal agency charged with balancing salmon
restoration and power needs in the Columbia River, have taken a hard
look at the overall production costs per returning adult fish of the various
Columbia River hatchery programs, concluding that hatchery staffing,
management and production costs per surviving adult range from
$64.35/fish for a fall chinook from the Spring Creek National Hatchery
in Washington State, to a whopping $7,437.50/fish for protected sockeye 
salmon from the Eagle Hatchery in Idaho, at the other side of the Lower
Snake River dam system. 

     The Columbia River hatchery system comprises more than 100
hatcheries, most of them required by law to mitigate for lost habitat
behind impassable dams, but has never had a systematic review and
follows no master plan.  The Council is in the process of that review, and
its Economic Independent Analysis Board compiled the hatchery costs
per fish numbers as an initial part of that analysis.  The numbers, though
much quoted, are greatly misunderstood, and do not take into account
any of the biological benefits of these programs, some of which are gene
conservation programs designed to prevent extinction of biologically
irreplaceable endangered or threatened runs, and to eventually return
these fish to self-reproduction in the wild.  Many hatchery costs per fish
are high because so few adult fish survive the passage of the eight
mainstem and other dams that dot the Columbia Basin, which work
against the success of hatchery as well as wild production.    For the
story see the 12 May Oregonian at:
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_stand
ard.xsl?/base/front_page/1021377699253972.xml.

     5:21/07.  U.S. ARMY CORPS REAPPROVES CONSTRUCTION
FOR 113 MARITIME PROJECTS, REVIEW PROCESS
CHALLENGED:  Just three weeks after the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers suspended 171 maritime projects nationwide, planning
economics reviews as a result of stinging accusations of inflated
economic benefits analyses, the Corps announced it was clearing 113 of
these projects for construction.  The agency-wide review "came as a
result of recent questions about the Corps' processes," Maj. Gen. Robert
H. Griffin, the Corp's Civil Works Director, said last month.  But critics
of the Corps pointed out that the order for review allowed regional
commanders to unilaterally decide which projects should be reviewed,
and that only eight remained under review as a result, a process that
some called a whitewash of past Corps problems.  Corps policy dictates
that major proposals must undergo economic analysis that show benefits
outweigh costs to the taxpayer, but critics point to a number of flawed
analyses in the past in which these benefits were seriously inflated and
ultimately did not materialize (see Sublegals 2:11/09).  Several
bi-partisan bills are pending in Congress to require independent analyses
of future Corps projects, such as H.R. 1310, H.R. 2353, S. 646 and S.
1987, as well as other structural reforms of the project selection process.
For more, see the 18 May Oregonian at:
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_stand
ard.xsl?/base/news/102172322087480.xml.  For more information from
Corps critics see the Taxpayers for Common Sense website at:
http://www.taxpayers.org/corpswatch.

     5:21/08.  SISKIYOU MINING BAN CANCELLED BY BUSH
ADMINISTRATION:  On 21 May, the Bush Administration formally
cancelled a mining claim ban imposed by the Clinton Administration to
protect the fragile ecosystem of the Siskiyou National Forest on the
Southern Oregon coast.  Conservationists and commercial fishermen,
including PCFFA, had endorsed and lobbied hard for President Clinton
to designate much of the Siskiyou National Forest as a national
monument, adding much greater protection for its key salmon and
steelhead runs.  However, in the last days of that Administration, citing
lack of time, the Clinton Administration was only able to impose a
two-year moratorium on future mining claims.  The Bush Administration
took that moratorium under review as one of its first acts in office (see
Sublegals 4:20/11; 3:03/12; 2:18/19).  Areas once again at risk from
future mining operations on these public lands includes Sucker Creek
watershed, one of the most productive coho streams in the Rogue River
basin and one of the last strongholds of coho salmon now listed under
the federal Endangered Species Act.  There are already more than 1000
private mining claims in the Siskiyou National Forest filed under the
1872 Mining Act.  For more see the 22 May Oregonian story at:
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_stand
ard.xsl?/base/news/102206862423020.xml.

     5:21/09. BILL TO REFORM 1872 MINING LAW INTRODUCED: 
A law first passed 130 years ago still allows private citizens to obtain
property rights to public lands by filing mining claims for less than
$5/acre, and if the mine is developed to pay no royalties to the U.S.
Treasury.  The Mineral Policy Center estimates that there are 500,000
abandoned mines nationwide, mostly in western states, that have left a
taxpayer cleanup bill of between $32 billion and $72 billion, and that the
1872 Mining Law has resulted in a giveaway of mineral rights from
public lands worth at least $245 billion.  Hard rock mining today is the
worst polluter in the U.S., according to the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, releasing 3.34 billion pounds, or 47 percent, of all
toxics released by U.S. industry.  A number of salmon-producing rivers
along the west coast are suffering from various forms of heavy metal
pollution from old and current mining operations developed pursuant to
this law (see Sublegals 2:13/04).  Most Clinton-era regulatory reforms of
the law have now been rescinded by the Bush Administration.

     On 16 May, Representative Nick J. Rahill (D-WV) introduced a
bi-partisan bill (H.R. 4748) to reform and modernize the 1872 Mining
Law.  Rep. Rahill is the Ranking Democrat on the key House Resources
Committee. The new bill would require payment of an 8 percent royalty,
deny permits to mine owners with a history of environmental violations
and provide for a fund for cleanup of abandoned mines.  A similar law
passed the House of Representatives in 1994 by a 3-to-1 margin, but was
killed in Conference Committee by intensive lobbying from the mining
industry.  Other pending bills to reform the 1872 Mining Law include
H.R. 4078 (Rep. Udall) and an earlier bill by Rep. Rahall, H.R. 1985. 
For more information on the bill see: http://thomas.loc.gov.  For more
about the 1872 Mining Law and its impacts, see the Mineral Policy
Center website at: www.mineralpolicy.org.

     5:21/10.  U.S. COMMISSION ON OCEAN POLICY - SEATTLE,
WA MEETING: The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy will hold its
eighth public meeting 13-14 May 2002, in the Commission Chambers at
the Port of Seattle Building, Pier 69, 2711 Alaskan Way, Seattle,
Washington. The meeting, which is free and open to the public, will run
from 1230 HRS to 1800 HRS on Thursday, 13 June, and from 830 HRS
to 1800 HRS on Friday, 14 May. At the meeting, the Commission will
hear presentations on coastal and ocean issues of concern to the
Northwest region of the United States. The agenda will include invited
speakers representing local and regional government agencies and
non-governmental organizations, comments from the public and any
required administrative discussions and executive sessions. A public
comment period is scheduled for Friday, June 14. The agenda for the
meeting will be posted at: www.oceancommission.gov before the
meeting. This is the sixth in a series of nine region-specific meetings to
be held by the Commission.  For more information contact Terry Schaff
at the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, by phone, 202-418-3442, or by
e-mail: schaff@oceancommission.gov.


NEWS, COMMENTS, CORRECTIONS: Submit your news items,
comments or any corrections to Allison Vogt, Editor at:
ifrfish@pacbell.net or call the IFR/PCFFA office with the news and a
source at either: (415) 561-FISH (Southwest Office) or (541) 689-2000
(Northwest Office).
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